


Maintenance & Repairs

by Philipa_Moss



Category: My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
Genre: Established Relationship, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 21:28:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8912593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philipa_Moss/pseuds/Philipa_Moss
Summary: It's September 2005, the washing machine is broken, and it's time to talk about that moment they don't talk about.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firstaudrina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/gifts).



            “Steaming bloody bollocks,” said Johnny. Or at least it sounded like Johnny. A pair of legs were sticking out from behind the washer.

            Omar crouched down, careful to hitch the back of his jacket up so it wouldn’t touch the sudsy floor. It was the fourth time in as many weeks the washer had gone haywire. A bit of cosmic irony, perhaps, that Omar had chosen to spend his life with the one man too stubborn to throw out this washer and buy a new one with the money they had readily available. Made, Omar need hardly remind Johnny, from washers and driers. “What now?”

            Was it Omar’s imagination, or did the legs go tense? He filed that observation away alongside the blank search histories and the mysterious errands and more than one whispered phone call and, of course, that moment they didn’t talk about. The file for such observations was alternately titled Don’t Be Paranoid, Omar and What Did You Expect, Omar and It’s Been Twenty Years, Omar and Shut Up Shut Up Shut Up.

            Johnny pushed himself out from behind the washer. “Overflowed, didn’t it,” he replied. The soft grey sweatshirt he’d been wearing that morning when Omar left was now soaked with soapy water, as were his jeans. “Fixed it though.”

            Omar stood back up and pulled Johnny to his feet. Johnny grunted a little when he stood. They’d both been doing that more often lately, but Johnny needed to be careful. A few years ago, the NHS doctor confirmed Omar’s suspicion that arthritis was the reason Johnny was creakier and achier than usual. Johnny had greeted this news as expected. That is to say, he’d treated Omar to a brief and sullen outburst about how those doctors were shills for the government and the government wanted his job and he was too young for arthritis anyway. Omar—quite prudently, he flattered himself—neglected to remind Johnny that Omar himself was mostly responsible for Johnny’s employment and that anyone who’d spent that much of his youth sleeping rough and getting in fights and jumping out of windows was the type arthritis liked best.

            “Good meeting?” Johnny asked later, when he was showered and changed and Omar was making dinner. He paused behind Omar, almost as if he were considering wrapping his arms around him, and Omar was already leaning into it when Johnny walked off, lifting himself up onto the counter. The backs of his heels left scuff marks. Omar used to berate him for being so slovenly, but with each year that passed, for some reason these habits lost their power to annoy. Rather, they stripped the years back, revealed a Johnny who was awkward in every possible sense in their shared space. In those first years, Omar tried to build opulence out of cast-offs—a vase here, a repurposed drape there—and Johnny knocked things down with overenthusiastic elbows and feet. He knocked things down, but when he crashed into the nightstand when he got up in the early morning, he got his tools and he sat on the floor in the half-light and fixed the loosened leg before Omar could even fully wake. Reassembled, the nightstand was sturdier and more level than before. The scuffmarks on the cabinets, Johnny wiped off with bleach before family came for dinner.

            Omar shrugged. “More of the same. There’s a launderette in Croydon closing and they expect to be bought.”

            “Are we buying them, then?”

            That was how Johnny was, insisting on his equal partnership but deferring to Omar on almost every business decision. Omar tried not to expect more, not when Johnny fixed almost everything that went wrong: sprung leaks, angry customers, nearly missed inspections. “Have to check the figures,” said Omar. “You’ll go with me on inspection?”

            Johnny nodded. Then he took a deep breath. “There’s something I have to say,” he said.

            If this was to be the time, Omar couldn’t be cooking. It was that moment they didn’t talk about for a reason. Open one door and they all opened. “No need,” he said breezily. He kept stirring.

            Johnny was silent. Eventually, Omar turned. Johnny had stopped bumping his heels against the cabinet. He had gone completely still, and was watching Omar in the same way he watched men about to take a swing at him.

            Omar turned off the stove.

            “No need?” said Johnny. He slid off the counter.

            “No need,” said Omar. “I’ve thought about it, and you shouldn’t apologize. It’s not as if I was in any danger. These bloody idiots say worse every day. Just because they’re not saying it to me…” He stopped at the look of stunned blankness on Johnny’s face and his stomach dropped. “What were you going to say?”

            “I wasn’t going to apologize,” said Johnny. “What are you talking about?”

            And that was worse, somehow: the knowledge that this thing that had been curling itself around Omar since July was, for Johnny, a passing moment, one nearly identical to those he once shared with his so-called friends. It wasn’t that moment they didn’t talk about; it was just that moment, easily forgotten.

            “In July,” Omar said, trying to keep his voice calm and even. “After the attacks. We went to the cinema to see that dreadful film.”

            “ _Mr. & Mrs. Smith_,” said Johnny. “Nothing dreadful about Brad Pitt.”

            “Right,” said Omar. He wouldn’t yell. He wouldn’t belittle or dismiss the way he used to. He would say what he had to say and then he would…what?

            Johnny was looking at Omar as though he were an animal who might spook. “Love, what—”

            “I went to get the tickets and left you outside,” said Omar. “When I came back, you were talking to a group of lads. Laughing about some shite Blair said. Never mind you looked old enough to be their dad. You had to fit in.” Johnny knew, now. Omar could see it on his face. “You remember. They saw me walking and they said—”

            “I know what they said,” said Johnny.

            “And you said nothing,” said Omar. “Let me stare like an idiot while they called me terrorist and so on. Let me walk into that terrible film and sit next to you as if nothing had happened. Did you see yourself in them?”

            “No!” Johnny’s fists were clenched at his side. “Listen, I know I said bugger all at the time, but—”

            “No buts,” said Omar. “That was your job, not mine. Those were your bloody protégés, not mine.”

            “I’d never seen 'em before in my life.”

            “Cut from the same cloth. You’ve changed,” said Omar. “You’re different from the boy you were when you joined the fascists. But you’re still afraid. You say you know what it’s like to be hated but you don’t. And you know you don’t know, otherwise you wouldn’t be so bloody scared to speak up.”

            His voice had risen without his bidding. In its wake, the silence thundered. Johnny dropped his head, and then straightened. “I wasn’t too scared to slash their tires,” he said.

            “And when I say—” Omar stopped. “What?”

            “Went to take a piss during the film,” said Johnny. “Slashed the tires on every dinky little scooter they rode in on.”

            “What,” said Omar. He felt as though someone had taken a whisk to his brain.

            “Should’ve said something,” said Johnny, his voice quiet. “I get that now. But I cut their tires cos no one gets to talk to you like that. Not again.”

            Omar felt himself nod. He stepped closer to Johnny. “You had a knife with you?”

            Johnny shrugged.

            “Jesus Christ.” Omar brought his forehead down onto Johnny’s shoulder. Only a little time passed before Johnny began, rather awkwardly, to rub his hand across Omar’s back.

            “’M sorry,” said Johnny.

            “You’ll do better next time,” said Omar briskly, trying to surreptitiously rub the few tears that’d worked themselves loose onto Johnny’s shirt. He straightened, and moved to turn the oven back on. “So what was it you wanted to say?”

            “Well,” said Johnny, “look, turn that off.”

            Omar turned off the oven. “Should I sit down?”

            Johnny was the only person Omar had ever met to smirk nervously. It was only one of his range of smirks, but it was one of the most affecting. “Maybe,” said Johnny, with a perfect specimen of said smirk.

            “Better out than in,” said Omar, and then spent a few seconds lost in thought trying to figure out which family member he’d inadvertently quoted. “Not that I’d know anything about that.”

            “Hmm,” said Johnny. “You know I’m not—that I’d rather slash a tire than make a…” He trailed off. “Fuck.”

            Omar knew better than to make the same mistake twice in one evening and assume he could read Johnny’s mind, so he summoned his depleted reserves and asked, “Does this have something to do with all the phone calls?”

            Johnny blinked. “Phone calls?”

            “You’re up late on the phone,” said Omar. “When you think I’m asleep. You’re wiping your search history too and if it were just porn—”

            “—you’d know, yeah,” Johnny finished. More than one of their friends found it disgusting—on grounds of excess sweetness—that Johnny and Omar liked the same porn. “It’s not porn.”

            “I knew it wasn’t porn.”

            “Well, it’s not.” Johnny took a deep breath.

            Omar couldn’t take it any more. “It’s been twenty years, I know,” Omar said. “We’ve had a good run and I hope you realize you’ll break my heart but I’ve been around long enough to have seen—”

            “You bloody idiot,” said Johnny. “I want to marry you.”

            Later, Omar would insist that he only stared for a few seconds and then shed a few decorous tears. Johnny would let him tell this story, and would just step in with his side of things: the calls to Tania across the ocean, the online searches for answers to questions about how blokes did this kind of thing anyway. Johnny would never tell anyone how Omar stared for a full minute, sending Johnny’s pulse through the roof, before he finally turned to the sink and vomited up a mostly empty stomach.

            Johnny stood there and rubbed his back as vomiting turned to coughing and coughing turned to, “Yes, yes, you stupid man, who else would have you.” And with Omar face down in the sink washing his face, Johnny could hide his shaking smile all the way to the toilet for Omar’s toothbrush, all the way making promises that he would continue to try to earn this life, no matter how long it took.


End file.
